15 Fascinating Avant-Garde Poems Explained

Avant-garde poets broke into the literary landscape of the first half of the 20th century to break with the rules of traditional poetic composition. They used various resources, such as free verse, prose, new sound rhythms, semantic and typographic experimentation, and the association of the written word with the plastic image.

Thanks to avant-garde poetry, and the disruptive and modernizing spirit that inspired it, poetry renewed and expanded its expressive possibilities. In the following sample poems, we explain how the avant-garde spirit of poetry was expressed in some of his best poems.

1. The good bye, Guillaume Apollinaire

Guillaume Apollinaire was a poet located in the transition between the 19th and 20th centuries, whose poetry had a sense of rupture with the poetic tradition. On The good byeApollinaire moves us with the melancholic images of him at the farewell, while breaking with the conventional forms of verse and rhyme.

I picked up this blade in the snow
Remember that fall
Soon
We won't see each other anymore
I die
Smell of time slight wisp
Always remember that I wait for you

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2. Sea, Filippo Tomasso Marinetti

Filippo Tomasso Marinetti was the promoter of the avant-garde movement known as Futurism. This movement, born in 1909, worshiped the machine age, and was characterized by its desire to sweep away the civilization of the past. In literary terms, this was expressed in the breakdown of syntax and punctuation marks, and in the exaltation of movement as a dynamic force, as in this poem, called Sea.

Oh great, rebellious and fierce sea!
Avenging sea,
Sea as it smells colorless... Come on, jump!
jump jump
up to the clouds, up to the zenith.

… And then bounce and bounce, without getting tired
like a huge ball!
Flood shores, harbors, docks, crouched
Like buffalo under their twisted smoke horns!
... Crush, oh sea, the cities with their corridors of catacombs
and crush the vile forever,
the idiots and the teetotalers, and reap, reap
in one fell swoop the bent backs of your harvest.

Pound the wells of the millionaires,
beating them like drums,
and launch, launch, avenging sea,
our explosive skulls between the legs of kings.
And say, vagabonds and bandits
if this is not the bowling alley you were waiting for.

3. Beautiful youth, Gottfried Benn

Beautiful youth is a poem by the German Gottfried Benn, included in his collection of poems Morgue (1912). It is part of the movement known as expressionism. The poem stands out for the violent and heartbreaking way in which it contrasts youth and death. There is no human body to evoke and mourn, but a dead body. And from this, rats emerge that will also face death. The poet breaks formal and thematic conventions by exposing contrasting, grotesque and paradoxical images by reversing the expected.

The mouth of a girl who had been in a reed for a long time,
she looked gnawed.
When her chest was opened, her esophagus was
leaky.
At last, woven under the diaphragm,
a nest appeared with baby rats.
One of the little sisters had died.
The others lived on the basis of liver and kidneys,
they drank cold blood and had
spent there a beautiful youth.
And fast and beautiful also came his death:
they threw them into the water all together.
Their snouts, what cries they gave!

4. Heart, crown and mirror, Guillaume Apollinaire

The writer Apolloinaire is frequently credited with the title of Cubist. This is because it coincided with pictorial cubism and with some of its disruptive elements. If in painting Cubism had experimented with typography on canvas, Apollinaire would do the same in reverse: he would experiment with the image in the poem written by means of his famous Calligrams, published in 1913. This practice, whose antecedents date back to the Middle Ages, reached new dimensions in the avant-gardes of the 20th century.

5. Fresh from Dieuze, Guillaume Apollinaire

Fresh from Dieuze is a calligram by Apollinaire where he introduces another avant-garde element: musical writing. For example, the presence of the symbol calderón or fermata, located right next to the expression "stop there." This symbol is an indicator of an expressive stop in which the sound indicated below should be allowed to expand until it is silenced by itself.

6. Harmonic triangle, Vicente Huidobro

Vicente Huidobro was a Chilean writer who created a literary avant-garde called creationism. Even before Apollinaire, Huidobro had already done some calligrams. Harmonic triangle It is one of the best known calligrams of the author.

7. Poetic art, Vicente Huidobro

The poem Poetic art by Vicente Huidobro is included in the book The water mirror, 1916. The author constructs his representation of the language and the poem. Huidobro announces the role he attributes to the poet: a divine creator, an inventor of new realities, a giver of life. Thus, it defines the aesthetics of creationism.

Let the verse be like a key
That opens a thousand doors.

A leaf falls; something flies by;
How much the eyes look created is,
And the listener's soul remains trembling.

Invent new worlds and take care of your word;
When the adjective does not give life, it kills.

We are in the cycle of nerves.
The muscle hangs,
As I remember, in museums;
But that is not why we have less strength:
True vigor
It resides in the head.

Why do you sing the rose, oh Poets!
Make it bloom in the poem;

Just for us
All things live under the Sun.

The Poet is a little God.

8. Doubts, Tristan Tzara

Tristan Tzara, exponent of the Dada movement, was characterized by strange associations of literary images, which seek to break with preconceived ideas in an effort to expand the imagination. In this poem, the poet plays with the limits between truth and doubt.

I have taken the old dream out of the box like you take out the hat
when you wear the suit with many buttons
when you grab the rabbit by the ears
when you come back from hunting
how do you choose the flower of the weed
and the friend from among the courtiers.

Look what happened to me
when the night came slowly like a cockroach
good for many as a remedy, when I turn on
in the soul the fire of the verses
I went to bed. The dream is the garden prepared for doubts
you don't know what is true, what is not
It seems to you that he is a thief and you shoot him
and then they tell you that he was a soldier
so it happened with me exactly
This is why I called you to tell me - without error
what is true- what is not

9. Karawane, Hugo Ball

In Dadaism, the spirit of rupture reached the point of breaking with language itself and meaning, at least in its traditional sense. Hugo Ball took the risk with the publication of the first phonetic poem in 1917, which bases his interest only on the sound of phonemes.

10. Girandoleby Guillermo de Torre

Guillermo de Torre was a Spanish writer enrolled in ultraism, as well as a historian and critic. He was the author of the book Propellers, published in 1923, which includes the calligram Girandole. As an object, the spinner is a wheel embedded with some rockets that fire as it rotates. In this sense, De Torre presents this calligram, alluding in form and background to the image of the girandula.

11. Trench, Jorge Luis Borges

Trench It is part of the ultraist stage of Jorge Luis Borges. Ultraism was a very brief movement and Borges himself ended up denying it. However, testimonies have remained of the production of this period of the author, who also received the influence of expressionism. It is the case of the poem Trench, in which warlike anguish and fatalism are perceived.

Anguish.
In the highest a mountain walks.
Earth-colored men are shipwrecked in the lowest crevasse.
Fatalism unites the souls of those
that bathed their little hope in the pools of the night.
Bayonets dream of nuptial glimpses.
The world is lost and the eyes of the dead seek it.
Silence howls on sunken horizons.

See also: Short story El Aleph by Jorge Luis Borges

12. Spergesia, Cesar Vallejo

The Peruvian poet César Vallejo is considered an innovator. He made use of free verse, and resignified the symbols of Western culture, such as religious ones. Such a thing happens in this poem, included in the book The black heralds (1919). The existential weight and sadness of a luck not embraced are present. The verse gains freedom and the rhythm becomes heterogeneous, with multiple sound accents.

I was born one day
that God was sick.

Everyone knows that I live
that I am bad; and they don't know
from December of that January.
Well I was born one day
that God was sick.

There is a void
in my metaphysical air
that no one has to feel:
the cloister of a silence
who spoke to the surface of fire.

I was born one day
that God was sick.

Brother, listen, listen ...
Well. And don't let me go
without carrying December,
without leaving January.

Well I was born one day
that God was sick.

Everyone knows that I live
I chew... and they don't know
why in my verse they squeak,
dark tasteless coffin,
luyidos winds
unscrewed from the sphinx
questioner from the Desert.

Everyone knows... and they don't know
that light is consumptive,
and the fat Shadow ...
And they do not know that the Mystery synthesizes ...
that he is the hump
musical and sad that from a distance denounces
the meridian passage from the boundary to the boundary.

I was born one day
that God was sick,
serious.

13. Your limbs are taking off, André Breton

André Breton was the founder of Surrealism and author of the Surrealist manifesto from 1924. The movement, one of the most influential in contemporary history, was based on psychoanalysis and applied automatism as a means of creation. In this poem, excerpted from Air from water (1934), Breton offers various suggestive and, above all, lively images that awaken all kinds of associations.

Your limbs unfold green sheets around you
And the world outside
Made of dots
It doesn't work anymore the meadows have faded the days the steeples gather
And the social puzzle
She delivered her last combination
Still this morning those sheets were pushed aside they made a candle with you from a prismatic bed
In the scrambled castle of the lama-eyed willow
For which with the head down
I left in another time
Almond sheets of my life
When you leave the copper of Venus
Innervates slick, edgeless blade
Your great liquid wing
Stirs among the song of the stained glass

14. Max ernst, Paul Éluard

Paul Éluard was a poet of surrealism. She maintains a very close friendship with the plastic artist Max Ernst, also a surrealist, with whom she carried out various works. The intimacy reached the point of building a strange relationship around Gala, a woman who, before marrying Dalí, was married to Elouard. Éluard dedicates the following poem to this painter, loaded with suggestive images.

In a corner the agile incest
It revolves around the virginity of the short dress
In a corner the sky released
Deliver white spheres to the foams of the storm
In a corner clearer than the whole of the eyes
They wait for the fish of anguish
In a corner the carriage of summer greenery
Gloriously still forever
To the shine of youth
Of the lamps lit with delay
The first shows breasts that kill red bugs.

15. You don't know english, Nicolás Guillén

Cuban Nicolás Guillén is a distinguished representative of Antillean poetry. His style was very personal and is a novelty when it comes to style. This poem is part of Guillén's first collection of poems, called Reasons for are. Guillén exhibits his very personal writing style, which was unprecedented. Part of its efforts reside in the rescue of the orality of the blacks of the Antilles, but it is also a political position against American imperialism.

With so much English that you knew
Bito Manué,
with so much English, he doesn't know now
bye ye.

The mericana is looking for you,
and you have to run away:
your English was from Etrai Guan,
from etrai guan and guan your tri.

Bito Manué, you don't know English,
you don't know english,
you don't know english.

I will never love you.
Bito Manué,
if you don't know english,
if you don't know english.